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Solomon is ten when he first holds a knife. One of the older boys drags him to a corner of the yard and draws it from where he’s slipped it into the waistband of his trousers. It’s a dull thing, feels like it could barely cut butter and looks like it’s somehow sucking in light with all the aging it’s been through. Solomon never learns where the other boy got it from, nor does he think to ask. They spend the rest of the day trying to whittle sticks into points with minimal success, fascinated by a toy they’re much too young for. A nun takes the knife from them before they come inside for dinner. The boy leaves a few days later.
Solomon meets an older couple and they take him home. They’re kind to him, and feed him well, and then a year passes, and the wife leaves. Solomon is left with him, and the next year crawls by, and the man’s anger grows. Solomon spends the summer hiding behind long shirts and making sure the other boys don’t jostle his aches too much when they give him friendlier shoves.
Autumn comes, and leaves scatter across the cobbles, and a glass shatters against the wall next to Solomon’s hunched form, and he quivers like the bare branches in their garden out back. Solomon runs when he finally gets his feet under him, and despite the alcohol on the husband’s breath he coordinates enough to meet Solomon in the kitchen. He grasps him by the throat, and Solomon doesn’t think.
Solomon is fifteen the second time he holds a knife.
Solomon is fifteen the first time he sees a man die.
The knife falls to the floor and he doesn’t think, he just moves. Steps over the blood pooling beneath the body of a man he could never call father, out into the garden, past the branches, out, out, out. His legs have carried him halfway across town and through most of the night before they let him slow.
And then the dawn breaks, and Solomon forgets. He flakes off dried blood from his hands onto wet pebbles. He washes his hands in the foul water of the Thames at low tide. And the sun rises, and so does Matthew. That night, small fingers slip perfectly into drunk pockets, and he forgets and forgets and forgets.
He boards a ship for the second time when he is twenty, while he’s avoiding the knife that started hunting him the night before. He saunters up with all the confidence he can with anxious sweat coating his body. “Sterling,” he tells the boatswain when he approaches him on the jetty. “Mark Sterling.”
Life on the sea isn’t entirely to his liking. It takes Mark a week to get his legs back under him, a week for his stomach to stop rolling every time the ship rolls with the waves. When he does, he remembers before, remembers this scene, remembers looking up at the men in the rigging and wishing he could climb up there too. He remembers his mother’s arms around him, stroking his hair as they looked out over the waves. He climbs up on the ropes and blurs out old memories with the new. His hands blister, bleed, and callous. When he looks up at the rigging now, there’s no awe. Just the knowledge of how rope pulls at his skin.
Without meaning to, Mark finds what home was. He finds a small town in the Mediterranean that’s similar enough that the memories break the damn again. The large family that raised him until he left, the warmth of the stones on the beach sinking into the soles of his feet. But the memories are so distant he feels like he’s catching glimpses through a frost-rimmed window across a wide street. And so he forgets, again. He doesn’t bother getting back on the ship.
He spends his days like he did in London; lying, stealing, trying desperately to live day by day. He learns the language he forgot, gains the favor and pity of grandmothers he doesn’t deserve. “Lucas,” he tells them his name is, when they ask. When they ask where he’s come from, the lies flow easier than they did when he first landed. As time goes on, he begins to believe them too.
When he tires of this place he isn’t so eager to leave it, so he keeps the name, though he tells himself that’s not the reason he does. He finds himself with another crew for a short while and the ship barely slows to let him tumble into the next port that strikes his fancy. He learns the language here too, though it isn’t so different from the two he already knows.
But the men on that ship and the men with heavy purses near the harbor all talk about new land, new possibilities, and Lucas is so tired of running from all of the history behind him. So he sits, and he listens, and tries not to be noticed, and talks himself onto the next English ship that stops to pick up cargo. He thinks about the Americas, and their potential, and all the things he hasn’t yet seen. He thinks about all the things with no memories attached. He thinks about not having to run, about not having to think.
And then he hears the call. Looking out at the horizon he watched as a child, the dark mark of a ship like a bruise marring the sky, Lucas knows he doesn’t want to die before he gets to forget for good. So he runs once more.
He doesn’t think when he grabs the knife. He knows how this goes. He wipes the blood off his hands on the inside of his jacket. His hands barely shake as he pushes back his sweaty hair from his eyes. He braces himself as the door cracks open.
“My name is John Silver,” he tells the pirate who finds him. “And I happen to be a very good cook.”